Panel: Dr. Stefano Candellieri Dr Stefano Cavalitto Dr. Davide Favero Dr. Valentino Franchitti The panel's authors are members of Aipa, Arpa, and Cipa, the three main Jungian associations in Italy.
Every research project should explore a gap left by existing theories and practices: the panel aims to foster the integration of Jungian metapsychology with contemporary language reflection.
Poetry offers many examples of how to express the unthinkable, the unutterable and the non-understandable. The poetic register of language, the “poetic function” as defined by the linguist Roman Jakobson, proves clinically useful as it is not only able to convey the transcendent function, unifying of conscious and unconscious, but also allows for a continuous transformation of the roles of Subject and Object, Supporter and Oppositionist, Sender and Receiver, i.e. the actants as conceptualized by the Lithuanian semiologist Algirdas Greimas on the basis of Vladimir Propp’s pioneering research into Russian fairy stories. From a psychoanalytic point of view, in fact, we might say that the patient’s deep emotional subject matter takes on figurative concreteness only at that moment in which it combines with a specific actant, and the so called “analytic field” can be understood as an unconscious “actantial chessboard” on which analyst and patient continually exchange the actantial roles previously mentioned, allowing for the “representation” and subsequent access to “thought” of that which previously could not have been represented or thought. Every “character/actor” (stemming from the encounter between a psychological thematic role - for example, the theme of guilt and punishment - and an actantial role, as Greimas pointed out) appearing in the patient’s account can therefore be imagined as a carrier of hitherto unthinkable emotions; exactly as happens in poetry, consistently with TS Eliot's theory of the “objective correlative”. This is one of the reasons why poetry is so important in the psychoanalytical practice. Poetry responds to the unrepresentable, to the obscure (Maurice Blanchot). Poetry makes it possible to grasp the “fleeting moment” of analytical happening, it attunes itself to it and to existence itself without the need to interpret. Poetry is, at the same time, language of words and language of images, it allows the intersection of the presentational order with the representational one, as Christopher Bollas would say, it allows the generation of a 'sensitive thought'. Then the analytical relationship becomes 'moving', as Jung wrote in 'Analytical Psychology and Poetic Art' (Jung 1922).
Examples will be given, in this panel, taken from poetry and literature and some clinical vignettes will also be briefly illustrated.
The panel will be composed of the following four papers:
Dr. Stefano Candellieri: “e a quel modo ch'e' ditta dentro vo significando. The poetic semiosis of the psychoanalytical process”
Dr Stefano Cavalitto: “Poetry and images, a suspension from worldly: conscius portions of unconscius”
Dr. Davide Favero: “The experiments of modernism and their reception in analytical psychology: Joyce, Jung and the contemporary Jungians”
Dr. Valentino Franchitti: “Poetry, Chaoplexity and Analytical Psychology”